Myths of Our Age

Allowing for the fact that I may be reading into things that don't require reading into:

ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

And apocalypse in general. No doubt this is to do with our fear of global warming, and perhaps also the saturation we experience, via news media, of terrible news. Maybe it's even a sort of utopian idea in disguise? Life has become so complex and tangled up that we would like everything to be reduced to a bare bones survival situation.

Zombies in particular are an interesting cultural phenomenon. Part of it is the joy of being able to shoot people in the head without feeling guilty. I think the rise of zombies in the popular imagination has to do with overpopulation (and again with the media populating our minds with other people even if we live in a hamlet in Surrey). We feel there are multitudes of hostile people 'out there'. This also has a cultural dimension, of course, as vividly illustrated by the recent issues around mass migration from the middle east to Europe. (Katie Hopkins openly fantasising about machine gunning boatloads of migrants.)

Zombies also feature in Game of Thrones, one of the most popular myths of the current era. In fact, as well as being all about dragons and all about backstabbing politicians GoT is all about Climate Change, and the fear of mass migration. Obviously 'The Wall' has become particularly charged as an image in recent years.

SUPERHEROES

YES, this could just be a fad, a consequence of CGI advancing sufficiently to make superheroes seem more credible, but there's surely something in the idea of superpowerful people offering a morally ambiguous way to fight crime/disorder which resonates with us more today than it did in, say, the 90s, when superheroes were less common on the big screen and were basically just camp escapism for kids when they were. The themes of surveillance, terrorism, vigilante justice etc. are of course consciously pursued by films like The Dark Knight and Civil War, but the point is these CAN be pursued without financially harming these movies, and perhaps give them a wider appeal and allow them to make a greater impact than the campy superhero movies of old.

I am rather too ill today to do this thread idea justice, but you get the point and can no doubt improve on it. I was also going to bring up HARRY POTTER, which is in many respects derivative of old myths but, it seems to me, is rather unique in fantasy fiction for DA KIDZ in making direct parallels between its villains and fascism. Again, like GoT, this is a myth which seems to be increasingly resonant in our orrible times.

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The zombie thing, I think, is partly to do with fantasies of a world which has been morally simplified, where in-group unity is possible without illegitimate exclusion or prejudice.
I think also it maybe functions as a kind of 'return of the repressed', a pale version of earlier ways of living low lost. Here ones immediate survival depends upon membership within an egalitarian group structure. Ones everyday activities are focused around meeting the needs of the group; finding food, shelter, etc. In a globalised world, where finding the place one 'fits in' is all but impossible, it again becomes possible to locate onesself within social life once more.
At the same time, there is an escape from the messier, vaguer stresses of modern life . In a way, zombie apocalypse scenarios can be considered as kind of utopian fantasies, the only possible means of transition to a form of life which accords with our 'species-being'.

the zombie thing is interesting. undoubtedly a lot of it has to do with fear of various other groups and alienation from society, but there's countless other disaster/post-apocalyptic scenarios that scratch that itch already.

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I find the whole Zombie meme, and how it's become a standard part of the mythological pantheon, rather scary.

In that it normalises the first-person shooter behaviour where you're wading thru crowds of dehumanised victims wiping them out with your automatic weapon or in ever more creative ways, or is it just me?

(As the man kind of almost says in teh video, though he couches it in a load of unnecessary thinky stuff - i reckon the zombie character has constructed itself in a way that precisely feeds this scenario)

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I definitely think that's a big part of it. Obviously you take away the headshots from Resident Evil and there's not much left. Actually, this was something that didn't occur to me about that Resident Evil game set in Africa, which now I think about it seems full on disturbingly racist. (Playing on Western fears of diseased African hordes. Colonialist really.)

Of course, shooting people has always been a big element of video games and action movies, almost always morally sanctioned by the targets being villainous. It's the same thing with orcs in LOTR, e.g.: you can safely enjoy the spectacle of the heroes carving up dozens of orcs in the knowledge that the orcs are irredeemable bastards to a man/orc.